OnboardIQ Raises $1.65M To Streamline The Hiring Process

Building a workforce that can scale with demand is no easy task for on-demand startups (or the traditional companies than now compete with them for labor), so OnboardIQ has raised $1.65 million in seed funding to help smooth out the process.

In a chat last week, OnboardIQ co-founder Jeremy Cai laid out the typical hiring process at companies who use his startup’s software. “Let’s say you pay for 50 ads on Craigslist, each at $75. You’ll get 10-15 applications per ad, but you’re trying to get 1,000 applications. Approximately 500 of the people who applied will show up to interviews, 300 will pass background check, and 250 will show up for orientation — but that’s generous.”

OnboardIQ automates moving applicants through those steps of the hiring process. Scheduling interviews? It sends open time slots to applicants to fill up an interviewer’s calendar without going back and forth over email. Instead of manually sending applicant information to a service like Checkr for background checks, OnboardIQ will automatically push that data through when they reach that point towards the end of the process and send HR a notification when they pass or fail.

The metric OnboardIQ uses to define its reach is that it’s automated 100,000 of those steps for customers since January. Cai says that figure “actually undersells how much time we’re saving for customers,” if you count the individual emails that had to be sent and spreadsheets requiring constant maintenance to process fewer applicants before they were integrated.

Dozens of on-demand startups use OnboardIQ, including Shyp, Munchery, Aliada, and Eaze. But as OnboardIQ grows, Cai thinks the startup will pick up more traditional companies looking to compete for the same labor pool as on-demand startups: “There isn’t much of a difference between hiring someone who can drive for your on-demand startup and hiring someone to work the register at McDonald’s.”

To improve its prospects for getting those kinds of companies interested, OnboardIQ is recruiting a team of front-end and Ruby-on-Rails engineers to improve and add functions to its dashboard, as well as hiring its first dedicated sales person.

While OnboardIQ is working to reinvent hiring for the modern workforce, it’s already managed to draw in some companies looking to hire for the jobs of the future, like one San Francisco-based drone startup using the service to hire pilots. It’s this wide-ranging applicability that’s brought in OnboardIQ’s seed and angel investors, who include SoftTechVC (with Andy McLoughlin joining OnboardIQ’s board), Slow Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann, Dropbox Head of Product Ilya Fushman, and all four founders at Caviar, among others.